The SEOer & The Missing 4%...

Some would say a mystery worthy of the great Holmes himself. Others would say it's the random blatherings of a Merseyside SEO Geek with too much caffeine in his system trying to avoid his to-do list. You can be the Judge...

[TL;DR: The fun of fixing stuff that other SEOs didn't bother fixing]

It all starts here.

I've recently taken on a new client. Nothing too unusual about that. A B2B business, well established, well respected and know their onions.

They also pay their bills promptly, respond to queries equally promptly, provide some digital assets and are a decent bunch of folk - something of a Unicorn some of my SEO Colleagues would say!

Now I knew they've worked with a couple of SEOers in the past at different stages in their business lifecycle. And you know, that's just fine. We all have different approaches and I'm not so precious as to think my way is the only way. Indeed, my way (collaborative with reduced bullshit) isn't right for everyone and that's just fine too.

But knowing they've had some previous work, I thought it'd be interesting to see how it all panned out during the discovery phase of onboarding.

Onboarding galore

Onboarding is a big part of Month 1 SEO. It's making sure you have access to any digital assets, Google properties, email addresses, website backend and all of that whilst starting to tickle the off-page SEO.

That posed a few challenges but we're now there with access to Search Console, Analytics & so on. That makes for a happy SEO Geek. I'd have celebrated with an Eccles Cake but I didn't have any, so just a mug of coffee it was then.

Then as well as looking to fill any glaring backlink holes, my Month 1 always includes an on-page audit. Now these can look slightly different depending which tool you use but fundamentally it's looking at on-page factors which impact how well Search Engines (and people too, to a degree) perceive your site. Does it have ALT Text? What are the page titles like? Page speed? Image Size? Navigation? Sorted out your 301s & 404s? All that sort of stuff that really, is probably only of interest to people like me.

So I fired up this trusty tool (one of several I use) to get a quick evaluation. A typical fresh-from-the-developer website will generally score 60 - 80% depending how good the webdesigner is (or how much they had to trim the time budget to win the job, onpage SEO at design stage often gets missed out) so I was pretty pleased to see 96%.

But I wasn't too surprised, after all, hadn't two other SEOers worked on it previously. Surely there'd be no low hanging fruit to grab?

But really the question should've been Why on Earth haven't they got it at 100% already?

Sometimes there's a good reason why you'll accept 99% - down to how a Wordpress theme is coded perhaps. But I do like to see my sites running at 100% if possible. "If a job's worth doing..." etc.

But it wasn't the usual crop of errors and I do wonder if they'd been strategically ignored as a 'too much hassle for now' type response. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

What was it??

A Canonicalisation issue (telling Google which version of a page is the Master) and some odd redirects that were showing up in the sitemap.

The canonicalisation issue was a bit peculiar & to do with the blog template but fixed quickly enough. The other one was really quite geekily interesting.

The sitemap was indicating some pages but those pages, although existing in the backend, immediately 301 redirected through to other pages so the original pages could never be seen by a human visitor.

Now that's the sort of thing that Google really doesn't like. At best it's seen as confusing and at worst, as a deliberate attempt to mask pages & fool Google - and you don't want to find yourself in Google Jail!

What was causing it?

There was no malicious intent but some older service pages had been 301'd to new pages as the business evolved. Those particular services had been dropped, so a 301 redirect to a generic page covering the closest replacement service was entirely appropriate.

But the problem was that the original pages were still published in the backend and so found themselves in the sitemap - but any attempt to follow the link hit the 301.

That was quite an interesting little investigation & easily fixed but I think it fell into someone's 'too difficult' box in the past. ??

One of those satisfying glitches to track down when you work out what's actually going on.

Was it worth it?

Well I'm from the school of thought that 100% is better, although in this case, it's a stepping stone. It will have a very small - but appreciable - impact on ranking & site experience but SEO is often a case of looking after the small stuff. They then coalesce & together, are much more than the sum of their parts.

And it's definately worth it from a satisfaction point of view and whilst investigating that, I've added lots of other onpage amendments that I can see should be addressed onto my ever-growing list. Trust the process. It's all part of the process.

What next?

Remember up there at the start of all this that I said I expected to find the site in pretty good order from previous SEO activity?

Looks like I may have been a tadge over-optimistic!

Ok, none of this is really, really bad but symptomatic of some neglect and should have been sorted in the past. It's just the yellow ones to be done now - looks like a two coffee-mug task to me! Onwards! ??

Moral of the story

Don't overlook the basics and NEVER assume that they've already been done!

But seriously, this isn't a bad site. There's plenty of good content & a reasonable backlink profile already in place. There's evidence of some SEO changes in tactics/direction in the past which have benefitted the site/business so the site's ranking ok and not doing too badly.

It can just be so much better.

I'm a bit of an oddity in SEO circles (some would say in any circles) as I can do words. I can do photos. I can do the analysis & backlink stuff and thanks to an engineering & troubleshooting background I like to get stuck in to the unusual glitches like this one - and fix the code. That gives a rather unique, holistic approach that I think is missing from much of the industry, but that's a different rant for a different day.

It's all grist to the mill. Want to know more? I have a selection of coffee spots throughout Merseyside - shall we meet up for a no-obligation SEO chat?

Will I find your 4%?